Feasibility Study Supports Use of Immunomagnetic Approach to Study Circulating Cancer Cells

Cancer researchers have combined the strength of magnetic separation with the specificity of immunochemical biomarker recognition to demonstrate the feasibility of capturing and analyzing rare circulating cells from the blood stream of cancer patients.

Writing in the March 4, 2015, online edition of the journal Scientific Reports, investigators at Dartmouth College (NH, USA) described a two-dimensional micromagnet array that they used to characterize generation of the magnetic field and to quantify the impact of micromagnets on rare cell separation. In this paper, they presented a theoretical framework and technical approach to implement microscale magnetic immunoassay through modulating the local magnetic field towards enhanced capture and distribution of rare cancer cells.

"The concept is to use novel cell-machine interfaces, integrated sensing, actuation, and biomarker recognition functionalities to isolate these rare cells (one per billion hematologic cells) from whole blood to determine malignancy unambiguously," said senior author Dr. John X.J Zhang, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College. "We will base the quantitative assessment on multiple tumor markers. This project demonstrates that a relatively simple blood test may eventually be able to provide unambiguous information to doctors about particular cancers in individuals."

The investigators found that there was good agreement between their theory and results of experiments using a human colon cancer cell line (COLO205) as the capture targets.

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